CLIPPING: National Post profile of Harper on tour

Saturday » July 23 » 2005

’Real’ Harper takes it on the road
To know him is to love him, his fans insist

Peter Kuitenbrouwer
National Post

Saturday, July 23, 2005

CREDIT: Peter Redman, National Post
Stephen Harper, who toured a Brampton construction site this week, says he believes that "in a fairly short period of time we’ve actually made good progress in getting to know the public."

OAKVILLE - Dusk in an expansive backyard of this well-off community finds a crowd of about 100 in Bermuda shorts and summer dresses gathered around an azure pool, drinking Pepsi from plastic cups, eating bratwurst and mingling with Stephen Harper, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Kathie and Allan Anderson, who lived in Calgary for seven years, are rhyming off the glories of Alberta: charter schools, private liquor stores, private kiosks to dispense driver’s licences. Mr. Harper, dressed in a golf shirt and dress slacks, approaches.

"I have to tell this story," Mr. Harper says.

"When I was 17, I worked at the Liquor Control Board of Ontario at Yonge and Eglinton. A woman walked up with a bottle of Baby Duck and asked: ’Sir, is there anything in this price range that tastes a bit better?’ ’Yes, Ma’am,’ the manager replied. ’Turpentine.’"

The guests laugh. Mr. Harper chuckles and adds: "Customer service."

This anecdote neatly packs in everything the leader of the Opposition wants to get across about himself while zipping around southern Ontario in a bright blue Chevy van emblazoned with "Stephen Harper Summer Tour 2005": (a) He’s an Ontario boy, born and bred; (b) he’s an ordinary guy who worked at the liquor store as a kid; (c) he likes to kick back and tell funny stories; and (d) having moved to Alberta in 1978, he wants to export that province’s model, where government is minimal and private enterprise, that prerequisite for good customer service, is king.

With Parliament recessed, Mr. Harper is on the road, trying to put a dent in stubborn polling numbers suggesting that, despite the Liberals’ sponsorship scandal, Canadians believe Paul Martin makes a better prime minister than he would. Even some fans see Mr. Harper as a cold fish.

"Canadians," writes Montreal journalist William Johnson in in an otherwise flattering biography released this month, Stephen Harper and the Future of Canada, "sense in him the absence of a common touch, of humanity, and for that reason they have not warmed to him or developed trust, despite all his impressive qualities. He is someone you can admire without really liking."

And so it is humanity that Mr. Harper seeks to project. On Thursday, he toured a construction site in Oakville, where workers are replacing cornfields with bungalows. Wearing a hardhat, Mr. Harper somewhat gingerly picked up a circular saw handed him by a carpentry foreman and made two cuts into a piece of two-by-six spruce intended for a ceiling rafter. He then tried his hand at smearing drywall compound in a living room.

The new street is named, perhaps prophetically, Stornaway Circle, the same name as the Opposition leader’s home in Ottawa. Asked if this is a sign he will never graduate to 24 Sussex Drive, Mr. Harper laughed.

"I think it’s a conspiracy," he joked, adding, "I love Stornaway. Where else can you live in a public housing unit worth $2.5-million and not pay anything?"

Later in the day, Mr. Harper sat down with the National Post for a half-hour interview in the dining room of the Holiday Inn Select in Oakville. (Mr. Harper sipped Diet Coke; he did not offer a drink to a reporter, perhaps a preview of a Harper administration: No more handouts!)

He appeared relaxed and jovial. As for Canadians not being able to get to know him, Mr. Harper says, essentially, that the media should cut him some frikkin’ slack.

"The leader of the Opposition is a person who for most Canadians they see periodically, with regularity, in 10-second clips criticizing the government. I think by the standards of most Opposition leaders, in a fairly short period of time we’ve actually made good progress in getting to know the public," he says.

"Obviously not enough. It’s going to require more work."

As for critics who call him a failure, he says, "About a year and a half ago, those analysts were making those kinds of observations about the impossibility of having a united Conservative party."

Another thing that grates, as Mr. Harper tries to build on the 22 seats the Tories won in Ontario last year, is that Ontario media refuse, he says, to acknowledge his local roots. So, just for the record, Mr. Harper grew up in Toronto and moved to Alberta in 1978, after high school.

"You’ll rarely see reference to the fact that I’m born and raised in Toronto," he says.

"The truth is I have almost no family in Alberta other than my wife’s family and my immediate family. All my extended family lives either in Ontario or the Maritimes."

Mr. Harper’s ordinariness and shyness may not play well in the media, but he sees them as strengths. "I don’t have a private executive health membership," he says.

"There has probably never been a national leader in Canada whose life experiences are more similar to the average Canadian’s. And certainly not compared to the current Prime Minister, who has grown up in the corridors of power and among the elite of the nation."

Yesterday, Mr. Harper travelled to Brantford, population 92,000, where the Mayor, Mike Hancock, took him for a walk in sweltering heat to show how a local college and university are reviving the downtown.

Mr. Harper didn’t receive quite the same warmth as he had at more scripted events with partisan crowds.

"I wanted to see where he was going on funding municipalities," the Mayor said. "They’re recognizing that it’s a problem. It would be happier for me if there were a more clearly articulated policy from the Conservatives."

His blue Chevy then zipped up through verdant rolling countryside to a stop at a Tim Hortons on the outskirts of Guelph, where a lunch crowd had been generously seeded with loyal Tories. One of them, Robert Senecal, took Mr. Harper aside and gave him a piece of his mind.

Mr. Senecal, a cleaning products salesman who attended the Tory policy convention in Montreal this spring, told the leader he is not doing enough to promote the policy platform adopted at that gathering.

"I think Canadians want to see a vision," he said. Asked what he thought of Mr. Harper’s response, he said, "I wish he could have been more decisive, a little more articulate."

Still, many Tories are just happy that, after years of splitting votes among the Progressive Conservatives, Reform and Alliance, right-wing Canadians today are generally content under one tent, with one leader.

"I can look around this crowd," said one long-time Tory at the Oakville barbecue, "and see all kinds, and there was a time when they wouldn’t mingle. And now it’s falling back into line."

This wealthy enclave by Lake Ontario, home to many Toronto executives, voted Conservative during the Mulroney years, sending to Ottawa Otto Jelinek, who became fitness minister. But the crowd here also hints at challenges for the Tories: First, the hated Liberals may be in Ottawa, but clearly no one here is hurting. Second, this is an overwhelmingly white, grey-haired gathering.

"I don’t think he’s going to fly," says one man here, who won’t give a name.

"He’s already driven my wife and daughter out of the party. We need to appeal to three groups: the young, women and immigrants. I don’t know how well we’re doing."

But the few youth here are clear: Harper rocks.

"I love him," says Liz Pilzecker, a student. "He’s very real. He reminds me of my father."

© National Post 2005

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